The NPR blog: It’s all Politics, posed the question: Obama Pay Freeze Reaction: ‘Draconian’ Or ‘Welcome’. The blog discussed Obama’s decision to freeze civilian federal worker’s pay for two years. The principles presented in my novel LIARS! say that society is having the wrong discussions. Society is missing the true problems. This is a good case in point. The following was posted to the NPR blog: It’s all Politics, on 11/30/10.
Robert Jones’ comment started with, ‘Big government is the reason we are in this financial disaster.’ Doug Christensen presented data showing pay increase discrepancies between federal and private workers. STOP! This is all SINGLE SENTENCE LOGIC. We are being manipulated. The real issue is, this is a hugely complex problem. Instead of presenting a comprehensive solution, we are being fed highly emotional black-white choices by both political sides, one issue at a time. Why? The politicos are vying for votes.
The sad part is, I don’t think the government is capable of doing the comprehensive thinking needed to find a solution. And without it, the world could be headed for some very serious results. I just saw a documentary on ancient Greece and Rome. They had magnificent cities spanning all of Europe – streets covered in mosaic tiles, majestic buildings etc. Where is all that now? Gone the way of Detroit? We need to deliver a VERY new message to OURSELVES. GET OFF THE SOAP BOX! No more one-bill-at-a time football matches. We want a recovery plan that shows how ALL the parts fit together. And those congressmen who are not able to understand what this means, or are incapable of creating such a plan, should step down – NOW!
Let me expand briefly on this comment. LIARS! presents the concept called SINGLE SENTENCE LOGIC as an inevitable consequence of human 3-brain structure and A2 logic. Human language is wired for short logical patterns. This feeds U.S. politics which is structured as an A2 political process – i.e. competitive, rather than organizational. The politicians are very tuned in to this human shortcoming and capitalize on it. Unfortunately, the result is that the focus on people is one of winning a contest, not providing an optimal, or even adequate life for everyone.
I then discuss the consequences. I don’t believe the structure of our government, nor the mentality or caliber of the people who run it, are capable of compiling a comprehensive plan to solve our current financial problem. They can only deal with the sub issues one at a time. For simple situations, this can work. For complex situations, especially those that include feedback mechanisms, the results are usually very different from what intuition tells us. So the results usually swing wildly out of control. Crude, simplistic capitalism, accepts this, believing that the oscillations will eventually settle down to some stable state. Unfortunately, it ignores the tragedy that will occur to so many people in the process. Counting on greed to be a positive force, it also fails to include the negative elements of the Seven Deadly Sins in the process. It fails to account for the Lord of the Flies problem – i.e. the drive to aggregate power. In today’s society, we are seeing both the oscillations and aggregation of power swing off the charts. This is what led me to envision the possibility of such a negative outcome. We now live in an age when people with middle aged principles have 20th century military weapons. Not good.
In summary, I don’t accept that we are going to come out of this recession like we have the previous ones. There are too many new constraints, from the environment, limits of resources, rapid communications that fuels mob mentality, etc. Without some unprecedented changes, as I discuss in LIARS!, I don’t think western society is going to come through this well.
Nanook
